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[x-posted on the Long 18th]

Anne, I agree with you that one of the many problems Professor X has with his teaching is his tendency to create defensive, self-serving narratives about his students and their abilities. These narratives allow him to ignore the deficiencies in his efforts to communicate, or rationalize his continued failures. So yes, storytelling, like any other form of representation, carries its own dangers of distortion. Nonetheless, I am not sure how we are supposed to get on without storytelling, especially in literature classrooms.

You argue that Professor X's problem lies in his desire to apply inappropriate disciplinary norms to his defenseless students, but I probably have a different view of norms, institutions, disciplines, and conventions than you do.

In my view, these formations may very well be contingent, but that does not mean that they just disappear when we recognize them as such. This, at any rate, is how I read Foucault's "genealogy," and I think it accounts for his attitudes toward science and normalization.

The connection between disciplinarity and Cynicism/cynicism is something I hadn't really considered, but I think it may be true insofar as both are inextricably tied up with linguistic convention. Again, I think that moralizing linguistic convention, like moralizing representation or storytelling, is probably less than helpful for analyzing the problems it creates, since lots of examples good and bad can be proffered on both sides of the argument, and I think that any rhetorical model of communication, let alone persuasion, would have to include some version of conventional language and shared "understandings." And this is what we're after in the classroom, right?

DM